The No-Panic Certification Roadmap for Quieter Months

Many tourism operators treat sustainability certification like an overwhelming school exam, scrambling to cram and gather data in a last-minute panic. In this episode, Samantha Smits delivers a practical, low-season roadmap to prepare your business calmly for formal verification. Learn how to map out an internal timeline to execute baseline reviews, compile supporting evidence, and update procurement criteria during your quieter months, turning compliance into a predictable, stress-free process long before the next peak market cycle.

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Transcript

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This whole visible success or confidence that you can handle things in a calm and quiet way is achieved by taking that sustainability seriously earlier during the quiet time in the low season. Hi, I'm Samantha Smith and welcome back to the Sustainability Edge, the tourism podcast. No Yargon, no fluff. We're breaking down sustainability and especially how to turn sustainability in a practical tool that gives you more profit, more time, stuff that's staying in a business you can be proud of. Let's get started. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the podcast. You know, as in tourism and travel hospitality in general, you go through the high and you go through the low seasons, and when the high moves over, you move towards quieter operational months, and quite some of you look at the calendar and think, finally, I can collapse and completely forget about my business for a few weeks. I mean, when you go and leave, fair enough. But the other months when you're still in the business, and as stated in some of the earlier episodes, waiting until the craziness of the high season is going to be back again to fix some of your back-end systems, to start working on that sustainability certificate, it can be one of the most expensive mistakes you make. So today I'm together with you mapping out a no panic map, because there's a lot of panic on this behalf, to use this low season to already do a lot of this and not wait until oops, the high season is back again, we have to do this last minute. So let's use these months until you're power. Even if you listen this at a time where they do not seem to be around the corner anytime soon, then still in any moment this will really really help. So a lot of the two operators and accommodation providers I work with or I hear about, they feel this work that has to be done to achieve a sustainability certificate with yeah, a lot of anxiety and nervousness, kind of like it's your high school end exam, where you in panic mode have to study last minute, or you just wing it and don't even go to study. And in this case, for the certificate, you panic gather 12 months of data, have ChatGPT generate all your policies without reviewing them for a little bit, and just scramble to find receipts and put everything together before you submit the report or before you get another 30 office. And this chaotic approach, it creates a big mess, it creates a lot of division because no one is aligned, there's a lot of stress for you and your team, and actually leads to weak systems because I mean, where even is the system? So, in this case, preparing for such a sustainability certification should never be such a scramble, but the natural consequence of yeah, your business already being well managed and being well organized. And of course, it's normal for people to not do something until you see the need to be doing it. That is one of the biggest reasons why you procrastinate, while we wait until we do things. Also, here with the work for sustainability certificate, compliance work, you wait until there's a deadline, until that agent calls you, until there's no way around it, until your biggest co-operator achieved one, and you're like, oh no, now I have to get along as well because they can now differentiate from us a lot. But there's such a big relief in in anything alive, really private, business, sustainability, not sustainability, in breaking something down in tiny weekly tasks, especially if you have a lower season, but also during a high season, it just makes things much more manageable. So here if we talk about such a certificate, I mean it could be divided in chapters, it could be divided in categories, it could be divided by department. Just break it down because taking any step is better than none. And whenever I mention the word step, I always think about my story that I climbed Kilimanjaro in December 2022 over the Christmas holiday because I want to summit on my birthday. My birthday is the 27th of December. And I never climbed a mountain in my life before at that point. I was not even sporty. I just remember in Tanzania a lot of people do run, and I just by principle don't run, also because I have, I guess, weak ankles and weak knees, so I always get into trouble. I prefer, like I did back then, to just go to the gym a few weeks before and to train my calves and to be like threadmill with an incline than to start running. And everyone was doping me. Oh, I only go, but that actually only fuels me more. So I did summit, I did summit Kilimanjaro, and all the porters and the guides and the assistant guides, all of them said the same thing. Here in Swahili, there's a saying called pole pole, P-O-L-E, and then double, pole, which means slowly, slowly you get there. So such as with the mountain, you just step by step, taking any step is better than none. So you take a step this week and a step that week. There's also the saying of even if you do 1% a week, you are at the hundredth within 100 weeks. So again, the whole point is about staying in motion and just doing something rather than nothing. And it's not necessary to do a big chunk at once, but rather do a lot of small ones over time. And by breaking it down in such small steps, you will also experience less stress because it becomes more of a continuous effort. I mean no one is asking you to climb the mountain in one hour. Even Kilimanjaro, they give you a week. You have to be some kind of record breaker or a crazy athlete to do it any shorter than that. So remove the urgency by starting early and doing it step by step. It gives you really the time, you and your team, to understand what is expected from you in such a certification and to you have the time to test solutions or to still create or gather some evidence when you don't have it yet. And if we compare this to the way that I work with my clients and the yeah, the how do you how do you say the trajectories or what I the packages that I even sell to my clients, and remember not the toolperator, I mean a guidance package in here, where I would always start with a baseline. So whether I do that for you or you do it yourself, start within your own business with establishing a baseline. Look at what is going well, what doesn't need more attention, what are opportunities, what are weaknesses, and what do we really have to work on? You have to know from what level you are starting to know what has to be done next. So do not start with writing any policy, start with that baseline, find out where you stand, what data do you have available, what data do you not have available, and then based on the results of that, you can start with compiling supporting evidence. Any certificate will ask you for supporting evidence, whether it is a screenshot of some emails, PDFs, media links, pictures, videos, anything that just supports the claims you're making. So you can gather this and or create this or identify what doesn't exist yet, what still has to be done, all based on what you found in your baseline. And after that you start writing all that's needed, the policies, codes of conduct, or you take templates if they are available by the certification scheme that you use. Point is you take one step at a time to climb that mountain, and this just keeps you moving without interrupting and without having the stress of oh this exam is due tomorrow. No, this is something you commit to step by step and then get there. When you to try to do everything at once, when you try to do everything at the same time, it just gets a mess. That is also why you have a team, right? While you have employees in different departments, because you cannot do everything alone. So the same for this, you have to categorize the different things that have to be done, because doing everything at once will just make you forget some steps and will just make it more of a messy experience and a stressful one. So going through it step by step and building your systems, your evidence, and in the end your certification report step by step will help you in ensuring that your business is fully ready for this experience, but also in a way that it's sustaining as we're talking about, that it is for the long term. So not just a one-time peak performance, like you rehearse a dance forever, or in this case, you would rehearse a dance one weekend before the show, you perform it and you immediately forget it after. That's also a lot of the things we've been taught in school, right? You pressure train or pressure learn it just before the test, then you demonstrate you know the dead time, but you're forget it after. Something is much more durable and long time, and something will be more memorable forever when you do it step by step, starting much earlier in advance. And here you really see the difference with the operators, the accommodations, or any tourism business that have made strategical use of their lower seasons. They are much more prepared for the higher seasons, they can even continue with their sustainable habits, they even can continue with these reports during the high season because they've done the majority of the work, they've established the rhythm and the habits during the low ones. It just gives them a massive competitive edge during the high season, which was built in the quieter months. So while some get questions during the high season and they cannot answer questions of their agents, or they're still scrambling and they're in administrative nightmares, you already have done that when you had the time and when things were quiet. So you with much more peace of mind can hand over anything that your clients are requesting from you, anything that your agents are requesting from you, or you already have that sustainability certificate achieved. You're not you're not stressing around anymore, you're fully ready. So this just comes with so much peace of mind. Your market access remains secured, your brand authority is immaculate, all is completely verified. It just brings so much peace even saying that out loud for you. And as stated in an earlier episode, just being disprepared helps you to stand out from that sea of sameness that was said during ITB, because it will visibly make you so much different from all the other mass where they are making noise and struggling and they're just surviving, and you're not I mean you survive as well, but you're not visibly struggling to survive, you just swim smoothly through this crazy sea and the crazy waves of the high season. Because again, here this whole professional action of yours are choices you've already made when things were quiet, and this whole visible success or confidence that you can handle things in a calm and quiet way is achieved by taking that sustainability seriously earlier during the quiet time in the low season, because then you've worked on the implementation and building a system that continues running the entire year, no matter what kind of season, and it is protecting your management and your whole business when it gets under pressure. So you can't your when your business structurally becomes bulletproof this way, you stopped reacting and panic moding to all of the changes and the questions you get because you already are ready for all of this. So, in short, do not waste your I mean again, of course, in the quiet month, go and leave. You have to recharge, please do go and leave. When you're back, and those yeah, the bridging time where of course there's also training for your staff members, training for the freelancers. There's still always time where things are quiet, and just use this time to build that system to get the sustainability certificate, to have all the data ready that is needed for questions from your agents, and so that it is easy to keep continuing even in the high season, break it into weekly steps, take it step for step, or guide your business calmly to success through such a certification. And if at this point I've triggered questions within you, you have feedback, you have agreements, disagreements, or just anything you would like to share, I highly encourage you, go down into the show notes, find there my website where you can book an intro call with me, find my LinkedIn, just send something directly to me, let me know your thoughts, let me know what's going on, and if I can help you structure this, as I said in the beginning, I also guide business through this myself, through a three-phase certification journey, where I always start with provide doing a baseline whether it's onside or remote, then based on the results, we're going to do the gap closing in phase two, and in phase three, I get your audit ready. That is my methodology. So I would love to hear from you, and I see you in the next episode. Thank you for listening, and congratulations on investing your time today to think strategically about your future, to make sure you never miss a step to understand sustainability better, how to grow your competitive edge. Follow the podcast right now, and if this was helpful, please leave a five star rating. It will help other people like you to find these tools. I'm Samantha Smith, and I'll see you in the next episode.